West Dorset MP Oliver Letwin gets job shaping Government policy
WEST DORSET MP Oliver Letwin has been appointed Minister of State in the Cabinet Office, which co-ordinates policy and strategy across Government departments.
He will serve under the main Cabinet Office Minister and Paymaster General Francis Maude.
The Conservatives’ coalition with the Liberal Democrats means that Dr Letwin has not been able to realise his ambition of a place in the Cabinet.
He will be able to attend Cabinet meetings – the first of which is being held today – but he will not be able to vote.
However, Dr Letwin is still in a position of some considerable power (and a body language expert in The Guardian, analysing a photograph of the first Cabinet, concludes that he “seems happy enough”).
Oliver Letwin, right, with William Hague in Whitehall. Photograph copyright Geoff Moore, Dorset Media Service.
With William Hague and George Osborne, Dr Letwin was one of the Tories’ main negotiators with the Lib Dems and it’s the seven-page agreement reached during those talks that is now the basis for Britain’s new coalition Government.
The agreement has not yet been finalised, and over the next week before Parliament returns, Dr Letwin’s job is to finish negotiating crucial details that could determine the way the Government acts for the next five years.
Those rules are coming under wider scrutiny. According to The Mirror, itself citing The Spectator, senior Conservatives “fear Nick Clegg will claim the credit for the coalition’s achievements while blaming them for savage public spending cuts.”
– The Spectator warns of a “big danger” that Mr Clegg’s party will walk away at a crucial moment in a devastating blow.
– Rules aimed at ensuring that doesn’t happen are worthless and only Tory policy chief Oliver Letwin doesn’t fear it might happen, the mag claims.
But how can The Spectator know that only Oliver Letwin “doesn’t fear it might happen”?
[And, philosophically speaking, even if The Spectator is right, might it not be the case that Dr Letwin’s hopefulness could usefully be adopted by other Conservatives? Sometimes fearing something makes it more likely to happen; not fearing it, less likely.]
[Psychologically speaking, it’s revealing too. Perhaps Nick Clegg could blame the Tories for “savage spending cuts”, and perhaps people would believe him. If “senior Conservatives” fear that prospect, will they next start to realise that perhaps that is why they failed to win an outright majority at the election? Because millions of other people feared what the Tories – unrestrained – might do. And they wanted the hung Parliament / coalition government we’ve now got precisely to hold the Conservatives back. The idea that the Conservatives failed to win because of the failings of the Big Society as an idea is, by this analysis, simpy wrong. Irrelevant.
Although. of course, the irony is, that “savage” is a word that Nick Clegg once used himself to describe the kind of cuts that would be needed.]